South Sudan
OHIO SHORT HISTORIES OF AFRICA
This series of Ohio Short Histories of Africa is meant for those who are looking for a brief but lively introduction to a wide range of topics in African history, politics, and biography, written by some of the leading experts in their fields.
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Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism
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Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
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Ken Saro-Wiwa
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South Sudan: A New History for a New Nation
by Douglas H. Johnson
South Sudan
A New History for a New Nation
Douglas H. Johnson
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Advance praise for South Sudan
“For anyone wishing to gain a fresh perspective on South Sudan, this new history is essential reading. Basing his account on decades of research and involvement, Johnson delivers a superlative summation of an exceptional history. Culturally and politically nuanced, his insightful narrative is engagingly written, economically delivering to the reader a real appreciation of South Sudan’s burden of becoming while, at the same time, scouting the forces that will shape its future.”
—Mark Duffield, author of Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples
“Douglas Johnson’s South Sudan is a bold project by an author deeply knowledgeable about how local histories have now merged into a new and troubled state. The book offers impressive details for how disparate ethnicities have come to take on the obstacles to building a nation, or the failure to do so. Johnson has been a consummate observer of this place and this struggle that has a history and faces extraordinary challenges to make a national future.”
—James C. McCann, author of Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop
“Johnson’s unrivaled knowledge of South Sudan’s history is apparent throughout this concise and readable book. His approach is both sympathetic and critical: South Sudan’s current woes are explicable, but not inevitable. It would be easy to see South Sudan’s history simply as a bleak story of oppression and misrule; but Johnson shows us that it is also a story of innovation and courage. South Sudan has a deeply problematic historical legacy, and the current situation is dire: yet as this timely book shows, it is not hopeless.”
—Justin Willis, coeditor of The Sudan Handbook
“It is a challenging intellectual responsibility to write a ‘new history for a new nation,’ but it is difficult to imagine anyone better qualified to do it than Douglas Johnson. In this brief book Johnson not only covers the entire sweep of the history of southern Sudan from the ancient period to the present day but evokes with precision and nuance crucial developments in the history of region and nation and its peoples.”
—Charles H. Ambler, author of Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism
“South Sudan: A New History for a New Nation is the best current political history of the world’s youngest nation by its most prominent living historian.”
—Deborah Scroggins, author of Emma’s War
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
9780821445846 (e-book)
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